Mexico Monthly Index

We are pleased to introduce a new Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for Mexico that runs from January 1996 to the present.

Newspaper coverage of policy-related economic uncertainty

We construct the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) Index for Mexico in the same manner as our newspaper-based EPU Index for the United States, following the methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Baker, Bloom and Davis.

Specifically, we rely on digital text archives for El Norte and Reforma from January 1996 and for Mural from January 1999. For each newspaper and month, we first count the number of articles that contain one or more terms from each of the following three term sets:

Second, to obtain the EPU rate for each paper, we scale the raw EPU counts by the number of all articles in the same newspaper and month. We use a regression-based method to impute the EPU rate for Mural from January 1996 to December 1998.

Next, we standardize each paper's EPU rate to unit standard deviation from January 1996 to December 2016. Lastly, we average the standardized EPU rates across papers by month and then multiplicatively rescale the resulting series to a mean of 100 from January 1996 to December 2016. An annotated plot of our resulting baseline EPU Index for Mexico is available by clicking "Download the Annotated Index" above.

As a sensitivity check, we constructed several variants of our baseline Mexico EPU Index by modifying our term sets as follows:

Baseline - War: Removing "guerra" and "guerras" from the baseline P term set.